Teched 09: Day #2 part 1
Sessions for today:
The new dynamics of Business Intelligence (Donald Farmer)
As a developer this session doesn’t really look interesting,
but on my organization BI becomes more and more important.
I’m glad I followed this session, because Donald Farmer is a great speaker in the first place.
He can entertain his public perfectly by using metaphors or other funny stories when presenting serious content.
In this session Donald Farmer tackles the different cycles of analytics without deep diving into technical details.
He stated executives of a company always have to do ad-hoc analysis.
The number 1 technology to make this analysis has always been Excel, which can be used in different ways (leaving in the middle which one is the best way)
So the Donald Farmer’s team has made a new add-in for Excel 2010: PowerPivot (CTP will come out in a couple of weeks).
It can also be used in Sharepoint 2010.
What can you do with PowerPivot?
You can import data there from different sources (db, Excel files,…)
Instead of making queries you just can construct them making filters in Excel as you would normally do.
In a demo he shows an example of 100 billion (!) rows loaded in Excel, which can be filtered out and sorted very smoothly.
They don’t store all this rows in that single Excel file, but they work with a histogram behind the scenes.
With PowerPivot they want to join two worlds together: the structured report data and the ad-hoc desktop data.
It will also be easy to publish the ad-hoc reports that were generated with PowerPivot for example on a Sharepoint site.
Team System 2010: project management & architecture (Brian Harry)
“Farmer” (he shows some pictures of his farm first) Brian Harry presents us the improvements in Visual Studio Team System 2010
on project management and architecture.
For project management the process will be customizable:
- Most of the reports in TFS are now based on Excel (instead of Reporting Services)
- The underlying warehouse will be simplified.
- There is a relational warehouse
- Excel reporting
It will also be easier to share the project data:
- The dashboards will be richer.
- MOSS Support: publishing to the portal.
- Use of web parts for Sharepoint.
Rich traceability
- Now there is an hierarchy in the work items.
- You can define relationships between the work-items.
Better scrum support
- They have built scrum in: agile workbooks for scrum like planning.
- Simplified template (probably no Conchango template needed anymore?)
- They have hired some scrum experts at the team to offer a new set of agile guidance.
Scalable
- TFS can be used for very small (TFS Basic) to very large projects.
- It will also be possible to scale up (farm of TFS-servers) and in this farms it will be possible to have cross project reporting.
The architecture of Visual Studio Team System will also be improved. You can render or create a lot of diagrams: layer diagram, Use Case diagram,
Activity diagram, Component diagram, Logical class diagram, Sequence diagram,…
Source code management in Visual Studio Team System 2010 (Brian Harry, Martin Woodward)
- There will be an improved conflict resolution in TFS 2010.
- They have added the abillity to give permissions for merging or branching.
- You can have private branches.
- You can visualize the hierarchy of your branches.
- There is a new conflicts tab in the pending changes window.
- There are renaming improvements.
- Rollback is only available at the command line, which I don’t understand, why haven’t they written a tool for this?
Also the versioning will be improved:
- Files and folders are versioned by name.
- You can have team project collections which can be administrated seperately.
At the end of the session Martin Woodward from the newly acquired Teamprise shows the abillity to use Team Explorer on Eclipse on Windows and Mac
The other 2 very interesting sessions from today will be on my blog later in part 2!
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